posted @ 12:40 amTo Wynne Delacoma's mention of
concert-goers who are upset when they hear a new piece and don't
like it, I say, "That's great!" It means they're involved,
that they care, that they wanted to have an experience they could
remember. And remember positively, moreover. If it happened to be a
piece that I or another critic thought was actually very good or
good but not up to the composer's other works, that's OK, too. I'll
take a passionate insult over an indifferent shrug any day... read more

posted @ 5:57 amI had a different reaction to Wynne
Delacoma’s post about angry audiences than critic Marc Geelhoed
did.

Years ago my son had a classmate in school who was an exchange
student from Graz, Austria. I met his parents, who were not
musicians, and mentioned that there was an important contemporary
music festival there. They replied, “Oh yes, we go every year.”
I said, with mild surprise, “Oh, so you like that kind of
music.” They replied, “Oh no, the music’s always terrible.”

They hated the complex postserialist music (this was at least 12
years ago) played at the Graz festival. But they went every year.

I wish American musical institutions could nurture this kind of
attitude in their audiences. Marc’s right that the angry reaction
is a sign of passionate involvement, but I think Wynne’s righter
that more people ought to have the maturity to be able to dislike
something without getting angry and cancelling their subscriptions.
And I suspect that part of the reason they don’t was that for too
many years we denied the audience the right to dislike the music. We
experts took the position that, “Well, you have to listen to a lot
of this music, and it’s very complex, and you have to train
yourself to listen to it, so just trust us, it’s great music, and
it’ll be good for you.” We should have empowered the audience
members to like and dislike whatever they wanted, and treated
disliking a piece of music as a totally normal experience. You
don’t like every painting in an exhibition, and you don’t like
every piece on a concert. Personally, I get a lot of interesting
insights from hearing music I don’t like. And I think what was
different about the parents from Graz was that no one had ever taken
from them their confidence that they were perfectly competent to
decide what was a good piece and what wasn’t. They’d show up
every year, listen to the latest Helmut Lachenmann circumlocutions,
say to each other “That was crap,” and no one ever lectured
them, “No, you just don’t understand it.” Their unshakeable
confidence in their own amateur musical judgment impressed me as
much as their willingness to go back, and I felt that one caused the
other.

On an unrelated topic, I’ll add that composer-readers Dennis
Bathory-Kitsz and Corey Dargel made excellent points about the lack
of distribution for, and investment in, types of new music that
audiences could easily love if they could only get a chance to hear
them. We’re fools if we discuss the problems of new music without
taking into account the massive, if often invisible, corporate
filters that keep the money-making status quo inviolate.

Starting around 1987 with the advent of the Bang on a Can
festival, a new generation of Downtown composers got started in New
York, more marketing-savvy and ensemble-savvy than their
predecessors, who were able to make themselves more palatable to
Uptown institutions. Concomitantly, more than a few thoroughly
Uptown-trained composers moved into the Downtown scene as a hipper
place to launch their careers from. If the making of lists hadn't
been discouraged, I could make a long list (starting with Phill
Niblock, Beth Anderson, and Joshua Fried) of important Downtown
composers that to this day no Uptown organization would touch with a
ten-foot baton. I say none of this to complain: I've done very well
by the classical establishment. But if you live your whole life
Downtown, you realize that the oft-heralded merger between Uptown
and Down is partly realized strategy, partly PR facade.

As a composer and performer (see Kyle Gann's list of
postminimalists), I know that when I compose, I am not trying to
follow a musical trend or style, nor am I aiming to create a new
one. I want to write music that will speak to all listeners; music
that is true and sincere. As artists, we each bring our individual
histories, whatever that may be, to our work. Because I was
classically-trained read more

I'll have to think about that. I actually think that ivy-league
modernists are probably more non grata at 66th St. now than Niblock
et. al. What's the likelihood of Lincoln Center commissioning
something from Mario Davidovsky (Columbia, Harvard)? But you're not
saying that, with the exception of certain major downtowners,
Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall have presented all the truly
important and seminal composers of our time - are you?

Beata Moon brings up music education or the lack of it - surely
one of the defining aspects of musical life today. But I've always
wondered whether ignorance causes indifference or the other way
around. Do audiences not care about what they hear because they
haven't learned about music, or are they not taught music because
people don't care?

posted @ 7:30 amWhat does the future hold? There is
nothing more difficult to talk about, and the conversation can
easily deteriorate into anxious chatter because no hard evidence
exists to back up anyone's assertions. Nonetheless, it's interesting
to try. Where will music (this music, classical music) stand twenty
years from now? There are strongly mixed signs. On the one hand, as
Greg Sandow has been noting on his blog, some mainstream
administrators are making apocalyptic noises about the financial
health of their institutions. None of us would be surprised, I
think, if there were a few spectacular failures, especially in the
orchestra realm, and most especially on the East Coast. There are
seemingly intractable problems in the way orchestras are structured.
Many administrators want to try a host of new approaches in
marketing, audience outreach, concert presentation, and so on, but
the orchestra unions are extraordinarily reluctant to make any
changes. This impasse is a train wreck waiting to happen. (You got a
glimpse of it recently at the Philadelphia Orchestra; more to follow
as other contracts come up for renewal.) Opera, we're told, is in a
much healthier state, but the Metropolitan Opera, for one, doesn't
seem like a happy camp these days, and it may be looking down the
same double-barreled shotgun of administration-union paralysis.
Pamela Rosenberg's forthcoming departure from the San Francisco
Opera is depressing: someone came in wanting to take a bold new
approach, and ran up against ye olde brick wall.

The end of several major orchestras and opera houses would not be
the end of the world. Kyle Gann has said many times that composers
would get along on just fine without orchestras, thanks, orchestras
having done so little for composers over the years. The loss would
be heavier for audiences, who, since the late nineteenth century,
have been trained to look for greatness in a symphonic tuxedo. Some
kind of catastrophic break with this chronic overemphasis on the
Orchestra might not in the end be a bad thing. But it would be
supremely painful. A lot of us city critics might find ourselves
going down with the ship. Yet I can't help feeling what will perhaps
turn out to be a foolish optimism. I see fresh faces filling
orchestras; I hear one brilliant new young singer or pianist or
violinist after another; I talk to student composers who seem free
of the resentments of their elders. (You’re all still talking
within the frame of Milton Babbitt’s “Who Cares If You
Listen?” essay, one wrote to me.) The infusion of new attitudes
must eventually have a consequence in the audience itself, and when
the audience changes everything will change.

There’s more to this train of thought, but I’ll stop for now.
I need to run the Condescension & One-Upmanship checker on the
remainder of the post.

posted @ 7:32 amWell, if all you want me to admit is
that some of New York's cultural institutions have swung more
Downtown than Up-, you've got it. BAM has been virtually a Downtown
institution since 1980, and Lincoln Center, initially under the
open-minded guidance of Mr. Rockwell, has followed along. Whether
the goods are getting divided fairly is not the issue.

Let me put it this way. I'm not just a Downtown kid looking
through the Uptown window and imagining all sorts of alleged goodies
inside. I'm chair of the music department at Bard, where I teach
with Joan Tower and George Tsontakis. We've got the Da Capo Ensemble
in residence. Thanks to such connections, I'm on many panels with
Uptown composers. I'm a program annotator for two orchestras, both
of which play more than their share of new music. I sit around and
talk to plenty of Uptown composers, and we marvel at how different
our opinions are, what different repertoires we know, what different
qualities we look for in a new score. I mention Robert Ashley
(greatest opera composer of the late 20th century, but a Downtowner),
and one of the most active entrpreneurs in Uptown responds,
"I've never heard his music, what's it like?" They admit
to me that if a score isn't meticulously notated, they cast it aside
as amateurish (Downtowners take a much looser attitude toward
notation). How do I know Uptown and Downtown haven't merged? The
Uptown musicians keep telling me so. When they start telling me
something different, I'll let you know.

How can we improve music education? I think Kyle’s point about
American audiences not feeling competent to respond to music is an
important one. So often have I witnessed children responding
intuitively to classical music only to have their responses quelled
by the adults... read more

Off for a few days and heeding Doug’s call to try again to
address the question of what could be the next big idea(s) in music:

Having gone on record as thinking composers today have the
wonderful opportunity to establish their own language as well as
style in a world bereft of a dominating stylistic presence, I
propose further that we look at composers, not movements or
styles, for the next big thing.

This sounds like a tautology, but it's not. It follows the recent
posts of this debate that suggest we take a longer listen to
contemporary composers we might think are major (whoever that is to
you, but you know what i mean). I would argue that the next
big ideas in music are simply going to be nearly synonymous
with what the best and most influential contemporary composers are
doing. It’s about quality and originality these
days, not imitation of others or adherence to a style.

So often in the history of music (to which I keep trying to bring
this debate back so it isn’t so focused on the
last 50 years or so), musical development occurs when a composer
does his/her own thing. Theorists writing about it later,
performers performing it, and other composers aping it are
also crucial, obviously, but it is the composer's originality that
is the driver.

So, the next big thing in art music is none other than Ades or
Adams or whomever. The next big thing is not a thing at all, but
people – composers. How one gets influential or programmed is a
conversation for another blog. But I think the question of big
things makes more sense thinking less of a style and more about
specific composers.

Just as Bach was quite different from others of the early
18th-century galant style, Adams (to pick one undeniably major
composer) is different from most other contemporary composers, even
post-minimalists.

If this seems too great a splintering of genres – that every
composer represents a style – just remember that the music of the
past still relevant to us today is but 1 percent of all
that’s been written. If we as critics are critical within
an egalitarian view that gives all composers a chance in our ears,
we can name who we think are the best composers and who are the
most influential.

Any of the composers on Kyle’s list, many of which I
don’t know and cannot wait to hear (I love his column on
contemporary composers in Chamber Music magazine, btw), can
rise to this occasion. And even an influential composer like Adams
doesn't force his style on others, though many may take
from it and it may form a sort of language (though not a lingua
franca). I think that today’s composers drive the train of
compositional style rather than sit as passengers.

Bravo to Kyle’s post on the right to dislike music: so true. In
America, the so-called general public often doesn't feel it has a
right to have an opinion about music - although members of the same
public are perfectly ready to pontificate about books, movies, and
visual art they know little or nothing about.

And bravo to Dennis Bathory-Kitz on the failure of marketing.
It’s so striking in this field that major organizations make tiny,
half-hearted stabs at marketing their product, then sit back and
wail about how difficult it is to sell classical music. If classical
music - ANY kind, from the least-known composer on Kyle’s list to
“Salome” at the Met - were marketed with the same savvy and
effort of your average movie release, it would be a lot higher on
the popular radar. (Sure, it takes money - but I think the big
classical music institutions, and I include record labels,
ultimately lose more money by marketing poorly than they would by
spending the extra bucks to do it well. After all, they all already
have marketing budgets and departments; but one wonders what their
criteria are for how successfully those budgets are utilized.)

It’s like Justin’s chicken-and-egg question about
indifference and ignorance: it’s a vicious cycle. There’s an
idea that classical music won’t interest people, so less is
written about it and it's marketed less, so fewer people learn about
it, so its frame of reference shrinks. This blog even propagates
this, since its scope is pretty selective. I’m not sure that
general readers, or even some classical music fans, will feel
included in this discussion. (I’m hoping a reader will chime in
here with another opinion.)

...but I think the big classical music institutions, and I
include record labels, ultimately lose more money by marketing
poorly than they would by spending the extra bucks to do it well...

-- Midgette

Anne: No kidding about classical marketing; it is truly
depressing! There is nothing more boring or off-putting than an
orchestra’s ad campaign. Why can’t they understand that engaging
in up-to-date marketing concepts doesn’t mean sullying the music
on stage? As long as you don’t goof with the musical quality or
programming, I say be adventurous with the ads. Besides, classical
music itself is adventurous, not that you could tell that from their
advertising (little “truth in advertising” here).

This is off the thread, I guess, but if symphonies and operas
can’t market the established, awe-inspiring ideas/music of the
past, how in the world are they to be trusted to market cutting-edge
music or the next big idea? There are such amazing composers working
today, but when new ones are put on a subscription concert, it is
still apologetically, usually not even mentioned (or barely
mentioned) in the ads. I am sorry, but “world premiere” is not
enough of a selling point!

It’s interesting to me that this is supposed to be a blog about
big ideas, but has turned into a blog about which critics like which
composers. I raised the question a few posts ago (that’s six weeks
in blog years) about why big ideas in music necessarily have to be
about NEW music. Since, as Wynne says, a large part of the classical
music audience doesn’t like new music, new composers are not
necessarily going to serve as ambassadors for Big Ideas, even if
they’re dealing with the ideas that most interest us, as critics.

Greg and I both posted earlier about some Big Ideas in the
classical music field that have given rise to a lot of discussion
and dissent among a wider public; but nobody else in this
conversation seems to share our views.

One of those ideas was contemporary stage direction, and I’m
coming back at you, Alex, because I feel your earlier posting on the
subject partakes of the hand-wringing one so often encounters when
music critics talk about stage direction today. I share your regret
that opera houses are not putting more energy into finding “bold
new opera,” but I strongly disagree with the idea that
interpretive stage direction is “a substitute for new opera,” or
that its ascendancy is “a tragic state of affairs” - even if
this idea represents a majority opinion in the USA. I think
contemporary stage direction is a Big Idea. I am happy to concede
that 90% of it is crap - like 90% of what’s new in any serious art
form - but the idea of plumbing the operatic repertory to find new
ways it can speak to an audience is not in itself awful or
anti-musical or sacrilegious, even in cases where the result is not
as successful as one might have wished.

One of the main proponents of creative stage direction in this
country is Pamela Rosenberg in San Francisco, whom you admire (as do
I) for her “bold new ideas.” Many of those ideas involved
opening people’s eyes to what this particular element of opera can
be, at its best. I gather that she had some real clunkers and some
glorious successes, which in my opinion is a pretty fine track
record.

Andrew: Amen, and it isn't only the big ad campaigns either. Some
of the pitches I get as a journalist are toe-curlingly awful.

I don't even think this is off the subject, because part of the
problem we face today is that marketing so assiduously seeks to
avoid big ideas. I get pitches inviting me to puff on cigars with
Susan Graham, or write about the "sex kitten" Lara St.
John (in both cases, shortly AFTER I had done major features on the
artists in question). But God forbid that any piece of marketing
material, from a brochure to a program biography, should actually
try to define an organization or performer or composer in ARTISTIC
terms.

posted @ 12:07 pmI half-accept your criticism of my
earlier post on the "tragic" phenomenon of opera
direction. I still think the celebrity opera director is in some way
a substitute for the composer, just as the celebrity conductor is a
substitute. Both allow new-music-hating audiences to hear the same
works over and over again with an overlay of novelty. (The suspicion
of new music set in long before the modernist heyday, as we know. It
was epidemic in the international music-loving middle class from
about 1850 onward.) Pamela Rosenberg's regime in SF excited me not
so much because of her fondness for daring directors but because of
her commitment to 20th-century and new opera. Nevertheless, I went
over the top in calling the situation "tragic." You can't
have a modern opera house or orchestra without an established
repertory. I want to hear the old operas along with everyone else.
And I want to see intelligent, inventive direction. Robert Carsen
basically rewrote "Die Frau ohne Schatten" in Vienna, and
the result may have been superior to the original. The trouble is
that it's an incredibly risky, unpredictable process, and some
outright frauds have made a career of it. I still haven't quite
recovered from the shock of "Parsifal" in Bayreuth, so
forgive me if I painted with too broad a brush.

The recontextualizing opera production isn't really new, though;
it's an early 20th-century idea (twenties Berlin one more time)
getting intensified by early 21st-century pop-culture shock tactics.
I wouldn't put it at the very top of a list of Giant Notions in the
performance world. So what might they be? I'm very excited by the
idea of taking music out of traditional concert halls; the
club-hopping cellist Matt Haimowitz has been mentioned, and he's
done something quite amazing. I like the the idea of the
bridge-building concert with smart pop musicians: the London
Sinfonietta has been doing a lot of this England, collaborating with
the minimalist-loving electronic artists on the Warp and Rephlex
labels. I like the general loosening of the concert ritual --
getting rid of evening dress, talking briefly to the audience
between pieces, fiddling with a shorter, intermission-free format.
Manipulations of the internet in all its forms are pretty huge; I
love reading musician bloggers, such as Helen Radice in the UK (see
harpist.typepad.com). But these aren't really a-ha Ideas so much as
practical consequences of a fundamental, inward change of attitude
among younger musicians, who are deeply serious about their art but
don't want to play out the staid, stuffy "classical"
routine anymore. More on this anon.

Maybe instead of groping in the dark for "the next big
idea" we should be listing the challenges we can see all too
clearly. And trying to suggest ways to deal with them.

The reactionary state of orchestras is one problem.

What other artistic phenomenon is virtually unchanged in the last
century? Where else, except debutante balls, do you still see men in
tail coats? What kind of message does this convey in an
increasingly casual and anti-elitist society? (I write this in my
newspaper office, where my standard summer attire is a t-shirt and
khakis.) When the Dallas Symphony Orchestra presented some
"Casual Concerts" earlier this summer, the audiences were
dramatically younger--and more attentive. Hardly a cough to be
heard, as opposed to the veritable squadron of consumptives who
seem to attend every main-season concert.

If audiences are hostile to new music, orchestra musicians are
scarcely less so. All too few conductors have any vital interest in
music beyond Shostakovich. If they deign to notice American music at
all, it's Copland, Barber and Gershwin. Period.

If they're shamed into paying some attention to newer American
music, it's apt to be a short, splashy curtain-raiser -- a short
ride in a noisy machine. The purgative administered, everyone
can wipe off and get on to the real music.

The DSO, never terribly adventurous, now hardly dares
program anything that the most casual concertgoer won't recognize.
Anything else and, I'm reliably told, the marketing department says,
"We can't sell that." They even put a stop to principal
guest conductor Claus Peter Flor's idea of pairing the Schubert
"Unfinished" and Bruckner Ninth symphonies. Chamber music
groups around here evidently consider Bartok and Shostakovich the ne
plus ultra of modern music.

The season-subscription marketing scheme has been
losing ground for decades. With leisure opportunities multiplying by
the year, people are less and less willing to book themselves months
in advance. Multiple subscription plans now offered in season
brochures are as confusing as IRS forms. But then marketing concerts
one by one is horribly expensive. I don't know the answer to all
this, but maybe presenters should just offer open-ended quantity
discounts: subscribe to any three concerts and get 5 percent off;
take five concerts and get 10 percent off.

Maybe we should be grateful for directorial imagination in opera.
Has any opera newer than Billy Budd (1951) come close
to joining the standard international repertory?

posted @ 2:03 pmMaybe it’s a function
of growing up in the provinces (Kalamazoo, Mich., in my
case), but I’ve never known people not to be confident in their
dismissal of modern arts. My pianist grandmother (B.A., piano,
Northwestern, some time in the ‘20s) didn’t like the
Schoenbergian strain and one year for Christmas bought me Henry
Pleasants’ amusing diatribe “The Agony of Modern Music"... read more

posted @ 2:12 pmNicholas
Kenyon finally hit it on the mark! The "Big Ideas",
"isms" and named categories happen afterwards and, while
it is interesting to see what name critics apply to certain groups
of individual composers, many of those composers eschew the
categories anyway, preferring to simply do their own work and get on
with it. Sometimes being included in a particular category has
had an inhibiting effect on the expansion of the musical output of
certain composers...read
more

If, in the past, composers have used their knowledge of audiences
expectations to help make their creative decisions (in which case,
composers with similar audiences would have a similar set of
expectations against which to respond), then perhaps a new "big
idea" or unifying idea will not be possible until a new
creative directive (something that takes the place of the past's
known quantity of audience expectations) emerges that can be
responded to by multiple composers during a similar period in time.
read
more

posted @ 2:43 pmI didn't mean to imply that I think
it's wonderful that someone is thrown into a violent rage by a new
piece of music they didn't like just because it shows that they have
a pulse or that they're obviously engaged, as Kyle pointed out I did
(can't seem to attach a hyperlink; it's Nothing to Do with Big
Ideas). I was thinking more along the lines that I'd rather have
someone disappointed and saying so about a new work rather than
having them A) Feel they're not smart enough to express their
opinion or B) Think they have to like it but don't know why they
didn't... read
more

posted @ 3:12 pmJoan La Barbara's caution against
"isms," categories, and lists is possibly the most
sensible thing that's yet appeared here. We are, of course, just
trying to have a conversation — throw out some ideas, have a few
disputes, show where we're coming from. I feel as though casual
posts are being scrutinized as if carved in marble. I guess, though,
it's always good for critics to get smacked around a little.
Profound, mysterious irony: some of us don't take criticism very
well. A composer correspondent has compared our blog to
eleven-year-old kids trying to explain their social networks:
"...so then Garrett and I used to be friends, but then her dad
got a promotion and now she's really stuck up, and then my friend
John well he's not really my friend but I'm going to invite him to
my bar mitzvah anyway..." Ouch. In defense of my own list,
which may very well contain Salieris and Hummels and a Hermann Goetz
or two in the bunch, all I can say is, this is the music I believe
in, and in order to present some kind of legible picture to readers
I am definitely going to be selective. If John Adams turns out to be
the mediocrity of all time, OK, but I've been singing "This is
prophetic" to myself since 1989, and that's all I have to go
on.

ADDENDUM: John Adams is my own example. Ms. La Barbara did not
place him at any position on the Mozart-Salieri axis.

posted @ 4:28 pmI may have missed something, but
here’s the tally of Big Ideas so far: 1. There is no big idea.
1.A. Fragmentation, or the lack of a big unifying idea, is the
big idea. 1.A.i. The individualism of composers going their
own way is the big idea. 1.B. Critics worrying about whether
there is a big idea is a big new phenomenon. 2. Polyrhythmic
expansions on the rhythmic complexities of the classic minimalists
is a big, or at least a medium-sized, idea. read more

I must leave early, so here are my last thoughts in what has been
a lively exchange. Thank you to all colleagues and readers. I’d
written a few paragraphs on elitism and contemporary styles and
other familiar topics, and I may still put them on my blog, but the best way
to bow out is to quote from some e-mails that have piled up in my
inbox, which render everything I was going to say superfluous: “I
think the most beautiful thing about composing now, as opposed to
then, is that there is the option to ‘hang out’ in the crazy
network of music that is available. Writing music feels like I'm
having a conversation or writing an e-mail or making a phone call
rather than writing an essay. It has to do with the way people talk
with their friends – a little language begins to develop, little
nuances and half-truths and leitmotifs.… Wise young composers are
eating everything up in their path, devouring all the available
musics and building a family made up of Conversants, rather than
Inductees.... The Future, which I'll define here as representing a
movement from Bad Attitude to Good Attitude, operates, like
evolution, on the level of the individual, not on the level of the
institution. If you see writing as a form of social engagement, you
soon realize that it doesn't make any sense to be undiplomatic,
ever.”

CC homeCC archivesABOUT THIS BLOG There was a time when great cities had multiple newspapers and culture was hashed out daily in the press, strongly-held opinions battling for the hearts and minds of readers. Today it's rare for a city to have more than one or two outlets where culture can be publicly discussed, let alone prodded and pulled and challenged... MoreTHE QUESTION BEFORE US If the history of music is the recorded conversation of ideas, then where do we find ourselves in that conversation at the start of the 21st Century? In the past, musical ideas have been fought over, affirmed then challenged again, with each generation adding something new. Ultimately consensus was achieved around an idea, and that idea gained traction with a critical mass of composers.

Now we are in a period when no particular musical idea seems to represent our age, and it appears that for the moment – at least on the surface – that there is no obvious direction music is going. So the question is: what is the next chapter in the historical conversation of musical ideas, and where are the seeds of those ideas planted?

Or: Is it possible that, with traditional cultural structures fragmenting, and the ways people are getting and using culture fundamentally changing, that it is no longer possible for a unifying style to emerge? Is it still possible for a Big Idea to attain the kind of traction needed to energize and acquire a critical mass of composers and performers? More